My Magical Place: John Wick Review

A thing is clearly happening when it comes to action movies at the box office these days. I don’t know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing but it sure as hell is happening, what with the success of The Expendables franchise proving that you can take action heroes from the old school whom we all grew up with but had pretty much lost their relevance and revive their careers and audiences’ lust for some good ol’ skop, skiet en donner flicks at the same time. Why stop there when you can delve deeper and take a star like Keanu Reeves after the mess that was 47 Ronin and put him in an action movie that doesn’t try to lie to you about the depth of its plot? This right here is the future of making movies, you guys!

They totally killed this cute puppy. Bastards!

John Wick is straight up one of the coolest movies that I have seen in a long time. This movie doesn’t beat around the bush because the only beating that John does is kicking bad guys in the teeth. What you saw in the trailer is pretty much it in terms of plot. Seriously, it’s Keanu Reeves’ character, John Wick and his wife died but because she’s an amazing woman she arranged for a puppy to be delivered to their house after she dies so John has someone else to love and doesn’t become too lonely. This is all good and well till some punk, who happens to be a Russian mobster type of guy’s kid kills his puppy when he wouldn’t sell him his car at a petrol station. It turns out John Wick is the most badass of contract killers in the game and he sets out to exact vengeance on the punk kid and all the henchmen who dare stand in his way (which had me thinking why henchmen are such a loyal breed of people anyhow? After seeing my buddies get their teeth kicked in I’d just go home). That’s it. What more do you want out of life?

Keanu Reeves is perfect in his role as John Wick because he’s just the sort of guy who really doesn’t sell the idea of being an action hero when he’s just standing around putting petrol in a car and then later when he’s kicking the snot out of bad guys you can then turn around and totally buy into it. A proper action star in the mould of a Jason Statham would ruin a role like this because he lacks a certain banal aspect that Keanu Reeves has in spades.

John Wick is Chad Stahelski’s first venture in the director’s chair and he does a good job of always upping the ante in terms of the actions scenes. Stahelski comes from a stunt co-ordinating background and has had a hand in many action heavy films over the years, working on projects like The Matrix, V for Vendetta, 300 and even stuff like The Hunger Games. The man sure as hell knows how to make a stylish action movie. This movie might be light on plot but it oozes style and the banter between the characters, although not on the same level and cheesiness as The Expendables is funny enough to have you laugh out loud at moments.

Adrianne Palicki

There are no performances worthy of an Oscar nomination here but the cast is rock solid with names like Alfie Allen (an even punkier kid than his character in Game of Thrones in this movie), Willem Dafoe, Adrianne Palicki, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick and Michael Nyqvist. The cast all deliver on the goods and it all adds up to a fun action romp.

I was a bit late on this bandwagon because, you know, Keanu Reeves and John Wick is almost off of the local circuit so be sure to pop in as soon as you can or catch it on Blu-Ray and DVD soon. If you like action with almost no plot but a boatload of style this one is for you and boy is it fun!

The Nerds Have Taken Over

‘Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.’
- Bill Gates

Not that long ago, in a galaxy known as the Milky Way, on a planet called Earth by its inhabitants, I read the words ‘Save A Non-Geek Today’ in a computer magazine’s Editor’s note and was amused by the seemingly farfetched concept. Little did I know that those words foretold of the tech revolution that has silently swept over the world and converted the masses into geeks without them even realising it.

A short decade ago people who spent hours playing video games, reading fantasy, sci-fi and comic books were thought to be weird and had chairs thrown at them wherever they went by their intellectually inferior peers. These people went under ‘derogatory’ labels such as nerd and geek and were generally frowned upon for their silliness and were told that they should grow up.

What people don’t know, though, is that you can’t keep a nerd down for long because he will go back to his secret lair (because we all have one of those) and hatch a plan, so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel, to take over the world! Which is exactly what happened, the nerds took over the Hollywood machine and with it the world. The message being sent out to the masses was (and I guess still is), ‘Don’t fuck with us! We know how to build guns that shoot lasers.’

There was a time when you had only a handful of television shows and movies to pick from if you had a craving for super heroes, space or medieval settings, especially if you were an adult and wanted something fantastic yet mature. Movie studios were reluctant to touch such material because they feared that they couldn’t sell it to a wide enough audience. Steven Erikson, Canadian writer of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series of fantasy novels, spent nearly a decade trying to sell his script for Gardens of the Moon and nobody wanted it because it was too ambitious! He’d walk out of studio meetings with his friend, and co-writer, Ian C. Esslemont with words such as: ‘Try something . . . simpler. Something like everything else out there. Something less . . . ambitious.’ Studios didn’t want to invest in material that audiences might find to be too complicated, which makes sense to a large extent but in the process they were grossly underestimating the intellectual capacity of audiences. People wanted something that would challenge them, hence the success of ventures such as The Matrix. People wanted to go to the cinema and be sold a fantastic story that is intelligent enough to actually buy into. People wanted, as Erikson puts it, ‘sophisticated shit’.

This, my furry friends, is where we are at, the space-age of television, cinema and literature in general. Admittedly it’s not the high-tech world envisioned by great minds like Isaac Asimov, in which the human race has conquered the stars, but strides have been made. The nerds are in charge of a large slice of the Hollywood pie and, like the gay community, we (me not so much actually, which is an outright travesty!) have the buying power to sustain that hold. Since the release of movies like The Lord of the Rings, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, 300, Sin City and others beside sci-fi and fantasy have had a ubiquitous presence in the box-office. This year has been great! Seeing releases like Thor, Priest and the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean and there are still upcoming titles like The Green Lantern and Captain America.

The masses love these movies and don’t even notice that they’re buying into the worlds of the kids they made fun of in school. Nerds have taken over almost every aspect of people’s lives. Just take a look around you at the wide-eyed uninitiated masses toting laptops, Blackberries, PSPs, DSs and hanging out on Facebook and Twitter – slavish devotees of the wonder that is technology with the nerds at the head of the revolution.